Upcoming workshop on sustainable procurement this Thursday

This coming Thursday I will be doing a workshop at the Lisbon Environmental Law cluster from the University of Lisbon. It will be a homecoming of sorts for me as it is the first time I will be delivering a session in person at my alma mater exactly 20 years after leaving.

The session will be composed of two parts: my talk and then a discussion with my good friend Miguel Assis Raimundo, sure to be lively and an opportunity for all to learn, including myself.

Without wanting to spoil too much in advance the gist of my talk will be a critique of the current prevailing view that we are moving public procurement from having rules on how we buy to what/why we buy instead. My take is that, in general, regulating what we buy in public procurement is a mistake and we would do better in not doing so, deploying instead other mechanisms that are more suitable and efficient to achieve such goals. There will be, however, a fairly big exception at the end.

Session will be hybrid so it will be available via Zoom and my deck will be available as well (minus a couple of slides from a work in progress from colleagues).